On a Friday evening in December 2021, half-brothers Christopher Baltezar Hernandez and Victor Armondo Aguilar stormed into a Tijuana home dressed in black and armed with a rifle and a revolver. Inside the home was their sister’s family of five, including three kids under the age of 9. The brothers shot and killed them all.
The killings were part of a cross-border family drama involving sibling rivalries, threats and shadowy motivations that unfolded after the death of their father, an alleged drug trafficker. “The split between (this) family was a telenovela,” a defense attorney said.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Linda Lopez sentenced Baltezar Hernandez to six consecutive life sentences and sent Aguilar to prison for 45 years, describing their actions as “cold, intentional, planned, calculated (and) callous.” Prosecutors described it as a “massacre.”
The brothers pleaded guilty last year to a murder conspiracy and five counts of stalking resulting in death for killing Jazmen Hernandez — the sister of Baltezar Hernandez and half-sister of Aguilar — her husband Gerardo “Jerry” Moreno; the couple’s 4-year-old daughter, Sofia; and Hernandez’s children from a previous relationship, Andrew Lewis Morales, 9, and Anamarie Jasmine Morales, 8.
Hernandez and her three children were U.S. citizens. Moreno was a Mexican citizen who previously lived in Fresno.
“This is the most difficult case I’ve dealt with so far and may be the most difficult case I deal with in my career,” Lopez, a former criminal defense attorney who took the bench in 2021, told Baltezar Hernandez and his attorneys. She said the facts were difficult enough on their own, but also that she doesn’t “take lightly a life sentence.”
But the judge said that for Baltezar Hernandez, 28, such a sentence was “warranted and appropriate.”
Though both brothers accuse the other of being the one who pulled the trigger, there was no legal need to determine who was the shooter since they pleaded guilty to a murder conspiracy, Lopez said Tuesday. Prosecutors wrote in a sentencing document footnote that the evidence suggested Baltezar Hernandez was more likely the shooter.
“The facts show he is the monster,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Mario Peia said of Baltezar Hernandez on Tuesday.
In sentencing the 23-year-old Aguilar to 45 years, which was five years longer than prosecutors recommended, the judge said he showed more remorse and took responsibility sooner.
The murders were the result of a family feud between several of the roughly 20 children of an alleged Mexican drug trafficker, according to defense court filings and testimony and victim impact statements by family members in multiple recent hearings. That man, who died in 2019, fathered those children with multiple wives and mistresses using his given name and an alias, hence the different last names for Baltezar Hernandez and Aguilar, according to one of his wives. It’s unclear if he was ever prosecuted in the U.S. or Mexico.
Just as the capture or death of a cartel kingpin can splinter families and close allies, the 2019 death of the alleged trafficker set off a power struggle among his heirs that devolved into death threats, accusations of child sexual abuse, assaults and ultimately the December 2021 murders.
“War has started,” one family stated just before the killings, according to evidence discussed in court Tuesday.
Aguilar’s attorneys wrote in a sentencing document that the alleged trafficker’s death “threw Mr. Aguilar and his family into turmoil, leading to the murders in this case.”
The exact motivations remain murky. Aguilar’s attorneys wrote that Baltezar Hernandez threatened to kill Jazmen Hernandez because he was “furious with his sister about properties and accusations she made about him.” Aguilar’s mother testified earlier this month that Jazmen Hernandez had accused Baltezar Hernandez of molesting at least one of her children, an accusation Baltezar Hernandez denied.
Whatever their motivations, the brothers admitted in their plea agreements to ambushing their sister and her family while armed with a .223 caliber rifle and a revolver. They shot Jazmen and her 8-year-old daughter in the kitchen. Moreno tried to barricade himself inside a bedroom with the other two children. The attackers shot them through the door, barged into the room and shot each child once more in the head.
“This was an atrocity planned months and months before,” Peia told the judge.
In a lengthy statement Tuesday, Baltezar Hernandez described a difficult childhood at the hands of an abusive mother and absent father. He blamed Aguilar and another man for forcing him by threat to take part in the killings. He said he knew he and Aguilar “caused a lot of pain and damage” but claimed he stayed in the car during the shootings, which the judge pointed out contradicted his guilty plea.
Aguilar, speaking in Spanish, apologized to the families of his victims, saying he knew there was nothing he could do to lessen their pain and suffering.
Aguilar’s attorneys in sentencing documents also described an extremely difficult upbringing for their client. “His turbulent childhood included witnessing violence and murder, witnessing large scale drug dealing, witnessing bribery, and seeing every part of narco-trafficking,” defense attorneys Knut Johnson and Danielle Iredale wrote. “He saw so much violence, including murder, at such a young age that he became numb to it.”
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Aguilar’s mother also testified earlier this month that she was in and out of jail and addicted to drugs when he was a child. She testified that after the killings, she overheard Aguilar on the phone saying he didn’t know the children would be there.
Prosecutors argued Baltezar Hernandez, on the other hand, specifically chose a Friday evening so the children would be present. They also alleged that the night of the murders, just seconds after he searched for and read information about the gory slayings on a Tijuana crime blog, he searched the internet for pornography.
“(Baltezar) Hernandez’s callousness to the murders is alarming and displays a truly depraved character that merits a life sentence and only a life sentence,” prosecutors argued in sentencing documents. “… (He) directly planned each phase of the crime as if he was planning a military engagement. He researched the location, secured the necessary equipment, planned for the execution of the crime, and plotted how he would get away with the crime … This is more than premeditation; this is obsession.”
The judge acknowledged the defendants’ difficult childhoods but said neither those harsh upbringings, nor their relatively young ages at the time of the killings, nor the various family rivalries and accusations justified their actions.
“This was a horrific, well-thought-out, well-planned-out crime,” Lopez said.